A Little Bit About A Couple Things

Last night's CB9 meeting was memorable for its sanity and lack of drama. Guess who wasn't there? AB apparently had a prior engagement and had sent a nasty-toned but typically stanza-ed shout-out to her minion (you know who you are!) blasting the Community Board for one lie or another and for having the audacity to change its meeting from the fourth Tuesday of the month to the previous Monday due to a little unknown holiday that affects almost no one in NYC called Yom something-or-other. Not like there are any religious Jews in Crown Heights or anything. Or Jews in NYC. What did Jesse Jackson say once off the cuff? Anyhow, trust me, that one got noticed. Rabbi Goldstein in particular had some choice words. I love it when Jake gets ticked; he's good for a great comeback.

But then here's the hilarious thing. After making all that noise about how insensitive it was to the community (read: her) to change the meeting date, she then goes around the neighborhood putting up flyers about her "Town Hall" meeting scheduled for Thursday. In a church. On Eid al-Adha, one of the most important holidays in Islam. Don't know it? Well, it's enough of a big deal in NYC that the schools have the day off. Frankly, I don't really give a shit about how misinformed, egomaniacal and mean-spirited is Ms. Boyd. But I do give her big points for managing to piss off the Jews and Muslims in a single day. The diatribes she sent to Board members citing paranoid theories and calling District Manager Miles names aren't worth the waste of 0's and 1's.

So at the meeting a couple interesting things, and I'll be super brief. First, a mini-Whole Foods style store called "Fresh Fanatic" is going to move into the new building going up at the Prospect Park train station. You may have seen the guys' other store just under the BQE at the corner of Washington. Bright sign, a bit garish even. But their stock and trade, as the jazz cats say, is deeply "in the pocket." That is to say, the business should do very well, what with its grass-fed butcher (the meat is grass-fed, not the butcher...actually I have no idea what the butcher eats) and organic local this and that and relatively decent prices. "Too Many Grocery Stores" came the complaints. "Too Few Grocery Stores" near Nostrand came the other complaints. "Give Jobs To Locals" said others. All in all, I really felt at peace with CB9 throughout. It's a terrific bunch of people, from every sort of background. And we're kinda starting to like each other too. Oh, and I really liked the gentleman who got up and told us, basically, that you don't need stores at all. You can get anything you need on the internet. And here's the crazy part...he's RIGHT!

The only potential controversy was that Tom Anderson, owner of the building, has been granted an extra 10 feet in height through a City program that started in 2009 (remember what a bummer that year was financially?) to get more fresh foods into underserved neighborhoods. And while you couldn't exactly call Lefferts underserved anymore, the whole District (out to Utica) could use more options, and a few years we signed on to the program. Ah hell, I'm finding it hard to care. 10 feet is 10 feet. Suck it up. 10 stories? Now I'll give ya a battle! You'd have to give me a Home Depot on the ground floor for that, Mr. de Blasio!

The traffic fixes I described a couple posts back, those sailed through. The head of Public Safety Avi Lesches hadn't provided minutes from his committee meeting. (Naughty naughty!) So we couldn't really vote on the liquor/beer licenses that were up for renewal. All of the businesses "summoned" before the Board had blemishes of some kind - police reports etc. One joint called Loki was a "big problem" according to (newly promoted) Inspector Fitzgibbon of the 71st. Congrats, sir.

Oh and guess what? They caught the guy that shot the guy in Ali's Roti Shop a few weeks back. Okay, sorry Joyce David. The guy who allegedly shot the guy at Ali's Roti Shop. Word from the brass is that it was a bad guy shooting a bad guy. Why is that comforting? I guess because it is. This idea that bad guys don't go around shooting good guys very often (on purpose anyway). And word is he's going away for a long, long time if they get the charges and prosecution right. That shooting, at least according to the Fuzz, was gonna happen. It was just a matter of where. And THAT'S why you need to frisk people down before they go into a club. I'm not kidding. We ask for I.D., we should know you're not carrying heat. The bigger nightclubs do it. Time to start thinks Q.

Lastly I took a peek inside the soon-to-open restaurant/bar at 705 Flatbush 'tween Parkside and Winthrop. The guys are nice, earnest, really pumped for their first big venture. (No, they're not all white. Some wise-cracker was making comments that I ended up deleting about how all the new business are white-owned which is just 100% bullshit. That guy obviously hasn't gone around talking to new small business owners or he'd know it's been a bit of a rainbow coalition so far, which is actually also true in Crown Heights and Bed-Stuy, but I guess white is often a stand-in for class anyway, and not many poor folks of color are starting businesses anyway because the costs of entry or so damn high. Not a lot of poor white people starting businesses either, by the way. And as if what upscaling communities are really clamoring for is more downscale businesses. It's just all so silly sometimes, the hand-wringing, and yet so tragically deep and emblematic of the true entitlement-power-cultural-class-race-dynamic. Guess who wins? I'm putting my money on the entitled elite. I'll bet the payout isn't very good though.

I'll save those hyphens for another one of my exceedingly long essays that I write now and then to make sense of things. Posts that I'm sure induce no end to eye-rolling, but whatevs).